Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger got away with a criminal cover-up today when he pled guilty to a misdemeanor in connection with his theft of sensitive documents from the National Archives.

It is undisputed that Berger illegally stuffed original documents relating to America's response to the threat of Islamic terrorism into his coat, pants and briefcase. Berger then destroyed a number of these top-secret documents, so that they will never see the light of day. The idea that this was "an honest mistake," as Berger now claims, is ridiculous. Obviously, he was trying to destroy documents that showed the negligence of the Clinton administration--of which he was a key member--in dealing with the threat of terrorism. Key documents relating to our government's inadequate reaction to the threat of Islamic terrorism prior to Sept. 11 are now gone forever, successfully purged from the historical record by one of Bill Clinton's most loyal servants. This plea bargain appears, on its face, to be a disgrace. If anyone can think of a reason why this is not correct, please let us know.

Those who have been with us for any length of time know that Deacon and the Trunk are Jews, while I am a member of the most boring religious sect known to mankind: midwestern Lutherans. Fortunately, a long-time reader who is not only a Lutheran, but, like us, an anonymous toiler in the vineyards of the law, sent us a link to this wonderful site devoted to the Lutheran liturgy: "A Lutheran Hymnal for Church and Home."

Boring, you say? Forget about it! This is exciting stuff. Where else are you going to find songs like "Hymn to God the Whatever"?

Check it out. It's the conservative alternative to Garrison Keillor!

We have written extensively about the fake "talking points memo" on the Schaivo case that ABC News and the Washington Post publicized, beginning on March 18. We have pointed out, most comprehensively in the Weekly Standard, that there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the memo originated with the Republicans, and considerable reason to think it may be a Democratic dirty trick. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post followed up on our critique here; he interviewed Post reporter Mike Allen, among others. Allen, like ABC News, took the position that it was all a misunderstanding: the Post had never meant to suggest that Republicans authored or distributed the memo, but only that some Republicans had received it. Allen told Kurtz:

We simply reported that the sheet of paper was distributed to Republican senators and told our readers explicitly that the document was unsigned, making clear it was unofficial. We stuck to what we knew to be true and did not call them talking points or a Republican memo.

As so defined, the story would have been a flop. The memo was distributed to Democrats and reporters; the fact that it was also distributed to some Republicans would hardly be newsworthy--although, in fact, hardly any Republicans seem to have seen it. But that is not how the memo as been reported. As we have noted, the document has been widely described in the press as a "GOP talking points memo."

Earlier today, we noted that Michelle Malkin has identified a number of newspapers that ran the Washington Post's story on the memo, but in a version that (unlike the one that appeared in the Post itself) explicitly attributed the document to the party's leadership. The key line from these stories was, "The one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators by party leaders, called the debate over Schiavo legislation 'a great political issue' that would appeal to the party's base..." If you run a Google search on "memo distributed to Republican senators by party leaders," this is what you get: dozens of news sources, including Reuters, have reported, falsely, that the "talking points memo" was distributed by Republican party leaders. Each of these news outlets attributed the story to "Mike Allen and Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post." Michelle concluded that in all likelihood, the Post had published this version of the story on its wire service, but then revised the story to eliminate the claim that the memo was distributed by Republican leaders before the story ran in the Post the next morning (March 20).

This hypothesis seems pretty obviously correct. And it was apparently comfirmed when blogger Jack Risko found this archived version of the Post's article by Mike Allen and Manuel Roig-Franzia, dated 10 p.m. on Saturday, March 19. It includes the discredited language: "A one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators by party leaders, said the debate over Schiavo would appeal to the party's base, or core, supporters."

So it seems clear what happened. The Post originally wrote a story that explicitly claimed that the "talking points memo" was drafted and distributed by the Republican leadership. That version of the story went out over the Post's wire service and was picked up by dozens of news outlets. Before the paper went to press, however, someone at the Post apparently realized that the paper had no basis for attributing the memo to the Republicans, and the key language was deleted from the story that actually appeared in print. That story said: "An unsigned one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators, said the debate over Schiavo would appeal to the party's base, or core, supporters." And ever since, reporter Mike Allen and others at the Post have said that they never meant to imply that the memo was created or distributed by Republicans.

This position seems disingenuous. The Post apparently did distribute a version of the story that explicitly attributed the memo to the GOP's leadership. And even in the revised version that appeared in print, the implication that the "talking points memo" was a Republican strategy document is clear. That is how everyone understood it. And, as we have pointed out in our prior posts, the Republican party has taken a giant PR hit as a result of the popular belief, fueled by news reports on the fake memo, that the party pursued the Schiavo case out of political calculation rather than principle.

Both the Post and ABC now claim that they never meant to accuse the Republicans of authoring or distributing the notorious memo. But neither has printed a retraction, clarification or correction. The Post has done nothing to correct or retract the version of its story that apparently went out on the evening of March 19. And to our knowledge, not a single one of the dozens of newspapers and other news outlets that printed the false claim that the memo was circulated by the Republican leadership has retracted or corrected that defamatory claim.

There is a story here, if our media wanted to pursue it. The memo in question is a pathetic piece of work. Any competent person could look at it and see that it is not a product of the Republican leadership. It is on a blank piece of paper; no letterhead, no signature, no identification. Anyone in the world could have typed it. It is incompetently produced: it gets the Senate bill number wrong, misspells Terri Schiavo's name, and is full of typographical errors. The only people reported to have distributed it (by the New York Times) were Democratic staffers. And--most fundamentally--it is absurd to think that the Republican leadership would produce a "talking points" memo discussing what great politics the Schiavo case was for Republicans. Those aren't talking points; not for Republicans, anyway. The memo benefited the only party that it could possibly have benefited: the Democrats.

If there were investigative reporters working for the Washington Post, ABC, the New York Times, or any other major news organization, they might want to try to find out where the memo came from. Circumstantially, it seems extremely likely that it was produced by Democrats as a political dirty trick. But such investigation seems to be beyond the capability--more important, beyond the ambition--of our mainstream press. Only bloggers look critically at documents that cast disrepute on Republicans. Mainstream reporters accept them uncritically, at face value, no matter how inept they may be. Why is this?

Sunday morning, I'll be on Howard Kurtz's CNN television program, "Reliable Sources," to discuss the "talking points memo." It will be interesting to see whether Kurtz tries to defend his paper's handling of the issue.

UPDATE: A reader points out that the Post's original story on the fake memo, which went out, apparently, on March 19, also included this paragraph:

Republican officials declared, in a memo that was supposed to be seen only by senators, that they believe the Schiavo case "is a great political issue" that could pay dividends with Christian conservatives, whose support is essential in midterm elections such as those coming up in 2006.

Someone at the Post swallowed the fake memo hook, line, and sinker--Mike Allen, I assume. Someone else at the Post apparently realized that the paper lacked facts to back up its accusations. I've written Allen to see what he has to say about these events.

In "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," Bob Dylan expressed the righteous anger of a witness to justice gone awry. Dylan's damning refrain has wide application:

You who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.

Following the last verse that recites the ultimate miscarriage of justice, Dylan changes the chorus:

You who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears.

Terri Schiavo, RIP.

Deacon notes below the New York Sun story by Jacob Gershman on the Columbia University report that was released today: "Faculty committe largely clears scholars." Gershman reports:

In an effort to manage favorable coverage of its investigation into the complaints, the university disclosed a summary of the committee's report only to the Columbia Spectator, the campus newspaper, and the New York Times. Those newspapers, sources indicated to The New York Sun last night, made an agreement with the central administration that they would not speak to the students who made the complaints against the professors.

The Sun obtained a copy of the report without the permission of the university administration. Last night, when a reporter from the Sun came to Low Library, the central administration building, for a copy of the report, a security guard threatened to arrest the reporter if she did not leave the building.

According to one student, senior Ariel Beery, one of the campus's most outspoken critics of the professors, a Columbia spokeswoman told him that students were not being shown the report yesterday "for your own good."

Attention here is naturally focused on Columbia's news management. The university appears to have transcended its old in loco parentis relationship with students in favor of a gangland-style family -- from "father" to "the Godfather." Mean Streets comes to Morningside Heights.

In James Simon Kunen's obnoxious book The Strawberry Statement celebrating the Columbia student shenanigans of 1968, Kunen noted that "Columbia" meant "America." According to "student revolutionary" Kunen, the "Columbia" of 1968 had showed what "America" meant. Kunen's commentary was leftist pap. It seems to me, however, that today Lee Bollinger really has showed what Columbia means, and it's not pretty.

But what about the New York Times? Is it conceivable that the Times would enter into an agreement not to talk to the subjects of a report in exchange for being given access to the report a few hours before it is made available to the public? Is the Times to be muzzled at such a cheap price? Here is today's Times story by Karen Arneson on the Columbia report, with nary a comment from the students whose complaints triggered the investigation. The New York Sun has shamed the Times, whether or not the Times has any shame left to feel.

UPDATE: Judith Weiss of Kesher Talk has posted a comment full of links to related items reporting that the Columbia Spectator rejected the same deal that the New York Times accepted (click here). Please check out her post and its revelatory links. Together with the New York Sun, the student journalists of the Columbia Spectator have shamed the Times. Unbelievable. (Thanks also to King Banaian of SCSU Scholars for the tip.)

Jim Hoagland has a nice piece on the latest problems facing the French elite -- a massive trial of 47 political and business leaders charged with conspiracy and corruption, and the possible defeat of the EU constitution by French voters. These events occur against the backdrop of an economy that just won't grow much, and the mass influx of a hostile, or at least sullen, immigrant population

Peter Schramm at No Left Turns expects Chirac to resort to an "innovative" foreign policy gambit to prop up support for his beleaguered regime. Not a bad prediction. But the usual ploy, some new opposition to U.S. interests, surely is worn out by now.

Lots of good stuff on Thomas Joscelyn's blog, Venona Project. Scroll down to March 29, for example, and check out his discussion of the Atocha Workshop, a forum for critics of the U.S.-led war on terror. Joscelyn's report emphasizes the desire of the global left to regulate news media, especially blogs. In the words of one participant:

Perhaps there needs to be a global inciative [sic] to improve journalism. To create standards and processes through which to include new technologies like blogging. Perhaps it begins with an academic study on the issue. The absence of variety in the media is a threat to democracy. Also, perhaps it is time to revisit the issue of whether public ownership is bad thing in the media.

It's all there: an academic study, standards and processes to regulate speech, state-run media, and the fake quest for diversity.

Last year, several Jewish students at Columbia University reported that they had been intimidated by professors of Middle Eastern studies both in and out of class. Now, according to the New York Times, a Columbia University panel has found that one professor, Joseph Massad, did engage in such conduct, and that another, George Saliba, made a "regrettable" personal reference to a Jewish student's appearance. In Saliba's case, however, the panel thought that his remark -- that the student had no claim to the land of Israel because her eyes are green -- more likely was "integral to an argument" he was making than an act approaching intimidation.

The panel found "no evidence of any statements made by faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic." But that finding isn't surprising inasmuch as the panel consisted entirely of five faculty members, several of whom have expressed anti-Israel views, according to the Times. This may explain why the panel viewed the statement referred to above to the green-eyed Jewish student as an integral part of an argument, rather than an obviously racist remark.

Nor is it surprising that, at least according to the Times' account, the panel seemed to find more fault with Jewish students who responded to the misconduct of faculty members and with "outside advocacy groups devoted to purposes tangential to the university," than with the faculty members who attempted to cut off debate by ordering a pro-Israeli student out of the class room for asking a question, as Massad did, or by invoking personal appearance as an integral part of an argument. Does the panel have any basis for believing that the purpose of the "outside advocacy groups" in question is other than to help promote an intimidation-free university environment? Absent evidence to that effect, one must wonder what the panel thinks the purpose of Columbia University is, if legitimate questions about whether its students are being intimidated by professors amount only to a "tangential" matter.

UPDATE: The New York Sun has more on the faculty panel report. The details in the Sun report, which the Times omitted, make the report look like a whitewash. For example, the Sun reports that "the panel essentially cleared the professors who on April 17, 2002, canceled classes on the day of an anti-Israel rally on campus and encouraged students to attend the demonstration." And it made no mention of an article that an Iranian professor at Columbia, Hamid Dabashi, wrote for an Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram, last fall in which he observed that Israelis suffer from "a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture." Had the panel mentioned this statement, it would have had to reconcile it with its finding that there is no evidence of anti-semitic statements by Columbia faculty members.

The Sun also reports on Columbia's efforts to manage the news regarding the panel report:

In an effort to manage favorable coverage of its investigation into the complaints, the university disclosed a summary of the committee's report only to the Columbia Spectator, the campus newspaper, and the New York Times. Those newspapers, sources indicated to The New York Sun last night, made an agreement with the central administration that they would not speak to the students who made the complaints against the professors.

The Sun obtained a copy of the report without the permission of the university administration. Last night, when a reporter from the Sun came to Low Library, the central administration building, for a copy of the report, a security guard threatened to arrest the reporter if she did not leave the building.

According to one student, senior Ariel Beery, one of the campus's most outspoken critics of the professors, a Columbia spokeswoman told him that students were not being shown the report yesterday "for your own good." Late last night, however, after some of the students who made the charges demanded to see the report, the administration relented and showed it to them.

It strikes me that Columbia is flirting with police state type tactics in order to defend the pro-Palestinian police state members of its faculty.

The Washington Post article of the day is further to Deacon's point last night about the new media image of President Bush as an executive asserting too much control over the officials charged with implementing administration policy: "Bush is keeping cabinet secretaries close to home." What ever happened to Bush the pawn?

Michelle Malkin addresses another mystery related to the purported GOP talking points memo: "What exactly did the Post say about that memo?"

If it weren't for Elvis, I might never have heard of Lowell Fulson. In 1960, when Elvis was discharged from the Army and out to reclaim his career, he reached back to a 1954 hit by Fulson to cut one of finest recordings -- a blistering version of "Reconsider Baby" with Elvis himself on rhythm guitar. It added the exclamation point to "Elvis is Back!" and closed the album in a big way.

Fulson was a classic bluesman who wrote, recorded, and performed in every blues style over a period of fifty years. When he died in 1999, VH1 posted a good obituary that includes an audio clip of "Reconsider Baby": "Bluesman Lowell Fulson dead at 77." The Allmusic capsule biography of Fulson by Bill Dahl provides an excellent overview of Fulson's long career.

Today is the anniversary of Fulson's birth and a good occasion to check out this vital artist.

Dartmouth trustee candidates Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki have criticized the Dartmouth administration for letting the school's traditional commitment to undergraduate education suffer. Their critique lies at the heart of their candidacies and extends to the administration's treatment of speech issues on campus and the decline of the school's athletic program.

The administration has responded in a manner more befitting politicians than academics. Earlier this month the Dartmouth Daily published a powerful statement by junior Alex Tonelli supporting the Robinson/Zywicki critique: "Step two: Electing the petition candidates." Yesterday the Daily published a guest column by alum Joseph Asch that nails the administration's response to the critique: "P.R. excellence." See also Asch's earlier installments -- "Dear old Dartmouth?" and "Be specific, please."

The piece by Martin Jacques in the Guardian that Trunk linked to below --"The Neocon Revolution" -- is less objectionable than I expected. For example, Jacques recognizes that President Bush's foreign policy is not driven by a single-minded ideological commitment either to unilateralism or to regime change. Rather, administration policy, though informed by certain basic principles, is formulated rationally on a case-by-case basis.

I do wonder, though, what Jacques and others mean when they characterize the administration as "neo-conservative." The people in charge -- President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretaries Rice and Rumsfeld -- were not, to my knowledge, considered neo-conservatives in the past. And the administration's emphasis on the pursuit of democracy stands in contrast to the views of original neo-conservatives like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who vigorously opposed “totalitarian” regimes but did not attach much importance to converting “authoritarian” regimes into democracies.

There's no inherent harm in calling the administration's policy neo-conservative. The mischief lies in the implication that the policy is not indigenous to the administrative, but instead results from a "hijacking" by "revolutionary" cosmopolitan intellectuals.

Earlier today, I linked to, and critiqued, a piece complaining about the alleged assault by conservatives on the independence of the federal judiciary. Later, I remembered that Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute had written an editorial on this subject in the Winter 2004 issue of the Claremont Review of Books. Here is some of what Kesler had to say in response to the Chief Justice Rehnquist's complaint on the same subject:

One has to ask: Are there no decisions by a federal judge however contemptuous of the Constitution or the other branches, that might warrant impeachment? Rehnquist apparently does not think so. . .By contrast, when Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist asked what are the safeguards against judicial "encroachments on the legislative authority," he cited "the important constitutional check which the power of instituting impeachments would give to [Congress] upon the members of the judicial department."

Of course, no one is suggesting that Congress subsist on a regular diet of impeachments. Rehnquist is correct that such a course would imperil judicial independence. But the courts are not supposed to be independent of the Constitution and Congress should not be cowed into thinking that there is little or nothing it can do about that. For example, there is its power to regulate and make exceptions to the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction. It's right there in Article III, section 2. And [Rehnquist] says nothing at all about constitutional amendments as a way to save the Constitution from the judges, despite the fact that several amendments, beginning with the 11th, have been adopted for that very reason.

We were all taught that our system is one of checks and balances. Thinking about the checks and balances that apply to the judicial branch, and utilizing them judiciously in some combination where necessary, does constitutes an affirmation of, not an affront to, our form of government.

Many commentators on President Bush's second-term appointments have linked the nominations of Secretary Rice to her position at State, Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank, and John Bolton to the United Nations as a troika making a particular statement. Tomorrow's Guardian, for example, publishes a column by Martin Jacques to this effect under the portentous heading "The neoconservative revolution."

Certain of the MSM outlets have suggested that by appointing officials who support his administration's policies, President Bush has demonstrated a troubling audacity. The Los Angeles Times thought it appopriate in this context to ask, in mulling over Wolfowitz's nomination, whether Wolfowitz can "display sufficient independence from the Bush administration?" I would guess that's a standard the Times would like to apply generally to Bush's cabinet officers as well.

Perhaps the most remarkable of President Bush's second-term appointments is one that has flown beneath the media's radar screen. We declared President Bush's appointment of our friend Rudy Boschwitz as America's ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva "A great appointment." Rudy's appointment turns the troika into something more like a grand slam.

After building a successful Minnesota-based business that is still going strong, Rudy represented Minnesota in the United States Senate for 12 years with great distinction. He was originally elected to the Senate in 1978 as part of "the Minnesota massacre" in which Republicans won the state's two Senate seats as well as the governor's office. When Rudy was defeated for reelection in 1990, he returned home and went back to work in his business.

Rudy was born in Berlin in 1930. He emigrated with his family to the United States in 1933 when Hitler became chancellor of Germany. In a story that he hasn't told for a while -- I might be off slightly on the details -- he recalled how while campaigning he was once asked by a born-again Christian who didn't know he was Jewish whether he had been saved. Sensing the discomfort on his behalf among the audience, Rudy answered that he had indeed been saved -- when he reached America with his family in 1933.

The UNHRC is a cesspool of anti-Semitism focused on Israel. Rudy has been an ardent advocate of America's alliance with Israel before, during and after his tenure in the Senate. It's hard to believe that in a lifetime full of philanthropy and public service, Rudy's most important mission may lie before him now in Geneva. Two weeks ago Rudy's appointment was unanimously confirmed by the Senate. Given the fact that Ambassador Boschwitz's appointment and confirmation have passed unnoticed in the media, the full measure of President Bush's audacity has yet to be taken.

DEACON adds: Isn't it odd that critics of President Bush's appointments are expressing concern that people like Paul Wolfowitz won't be sufficiently independent of the administration. I thought the complaint against the big bad neo-conservatives was that they control the administration, not that the administration controls them. The answer, of course, is that this is about naked resentment, and little else.

A student at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana hit Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol in the face with a pie as he was deep into a speech on foreign policy last night: "Earlham student hits pundit with pie." The unflappable Dr. Kristol responded: "Just let me finish this point."

Being smart and funny is a winning combination. And sometimes a good example is contagious. Even the AP reporter covering the incident seems to catch the spirit. Consider the closing line of his report: "Earlham is a liberal arts college of about 1,200 students that is well-known for its peace studies program."

Haider Ajina has translated poll results that appeared today in the Iraqi newspaper Almendhar. What makes this survey particularly interesting is that it was conducted in Najaf, which Haider describes as "the center of the Shiite branch of Islam and possibly the most religiously conservative city in Iraq if not in the northern middle east." The poll, conducted by the school of political science of Najaf University, includes the following results:

62% of those polled said they wanted Islam to a beginning sources of the constitution. 38% wanted Islam to be the only source for the Iraqi constitution. 49% support a federal government. 50% support allowing those who boycotted the election to have input in writing the constitution. 63% support the multi national forces staying in Iraq for the current time. 85% expect the new transitional government to succeed in its goals. 78% expect the new national assembly to successfully write a constitution by the dead line. 1% said they expect civil war to break out.

This is just one more item in a rapidly-expanding body of evidence that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis reject fanaticism and sectarian conflict.

I'm home in bed today with a wicked cold, and have whiled away the time with various email exchanges. In the course of these, I found that I was being denounced as a "liar" because of my description in the Weekly Standard of the two versions of the mysterious "talking points" memo on the Schiavo case. I wrote that there were a total of six errors in the ABC News version of the memo. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you should probably skip to the next post.) The first of these was that the Senate bill number was wrong. That leaves five errors in the body of the memo. ABC News caught four of these five errors and marked each with a "sic"; one in the first paragraph ("Teri"), two in the sixth paragraph (two "ors" and "withdrawl") and one in the seventh ("withdrawl"). ABC missed (along with the bill number) another typo, "applicably" for "applicable" in the sixth paragraph.

I wrote that in the version of the memo that was later leaked to a web site called Raw Story, and appeared in jpeg format, all four of the errors that ABC had caught and identified with a "sic" were corrected, but the two that ABC missed--the bill number and "applicably"--were not corrected. I went back and forth between the two versions of the memos at least five times to make sure that I was right about this. Each time my eyes saw the same thing: all four typos corrected. This afternoon, I got an email accusing me of being a "liar" because only three of the four errors were fixed in the Raw Story version. I went back and checked the memos twice more. Sure enough, all four were fixed. Then I got another email pointing out that "Teri" in the first paragraph is still "Teri" in the second version of the memo. I went back and looked again, for what must have been the tenth time. To my horror, I found that the emailer was right: "Teri" is misspelled in both memos. So, to recant: as I had said in the first place in a post on March 23, relying on an email from a reader, three of the four errors identified by ABC were corrected, not all four.

How does that happen? The same way, I guess, that we sometimes proofread a brief over and over, and then, when we pull it out a month later, see a typo. The memo said "Teri," but my eyes saw "Terri."

Does this have any significance? Not much, but I wanted to set the record straight because earlier today I repeated my conviction that all four mistakes noted with a "sic" had been changed. For what it's worth, the fact that not all of the ABC-designated errors were corrected makes it less likely that whoever corrected the memo did so on the basis of having seen the ABC post. As far as the genuineness of the memo is concerned, this is obviously a minor point, at best. What we know is this: There were at least two versions of the memo, the second a cleaned-up version of the first. The second version appeared online after the text of the original had been posted by ABC, with errors noted. We don't know who created either version, or when, or why; we don't know when or why the corrections were made. The errors are a minor part of the story, but they illustrate how little we know about the provenance of the memo. And, of course, the very poor quality of the memo is at odds with its purported status as a high-level strategy document.

Beyond that, I guess the moral of the story is that we middle-aged lawyers have spent too many years poring over law books, and can no longer trust our eyesight!

John Fund looks at three books about the Contract With America, the document that helped the Republicans win control of Congress a decade ago. One of the books is by the master-mind behind the Contract, Newt Gingrich.

I view the Contract as a key element in the process through which the Republicans supplanted the Democrats as the party of pragmatism (a phenomenon I discussed here). The key precursor to the process was Bill Clinton's decision to pursue health care reform before welfare reform, and his failure to pursue health care reform through a pragmatic approach. This opened the door to Gingrich to seize the mantle of pragmatism, which he did through the Contract. When Gingrich squandered his momentum, the parties entered a brief period of equipoise, which ended with the emergence of another pragmatist, George W. Bush.

For more than a week, the mainstream media have been beating up the Republican Party over an alleged "GOP talking points memo" that, they argue, proves the Republicans took up the Terri Schiavo case in hopes of political gain. We, on the other hand, have questioned repeatedly whether the memo was authored by Republicans at all, and have raised the possibility that it is a Democratic dirty trick. The best short summary of the arguments and evidence is my article in the Daily Standard.

The Washington Post's media critic, Howard Kurtz, has now taken up the case in an article titled "Doubts Raised On Schaivo Memo". Kurtz interviewed me for the article, and quotes me a couple of times. He also interviewed Jeffrey Schneider, a spokesman for ABC News, and his own colleague Mike Allen. The bottom line: both ABC News and the Washington Post are now disavowing any claim that the alleged "talking points memo" was authored by a Republican, let alone that it was some kind of official Republican strategy memo.

ABC's Schneider told Kurtz, consistent with what he said to blogger Josh Claybourn:

ABC News had very reliable, multiple sources who indicated the memo was distributed to Republicans on the floor of the Senate, and that is what we reported.

Of course, the fact that the memo was distributed to some Republicans, just as it was distributed to some Democrats and some reporters, was never in doubt. The questions are: 1) where did it come from, and 2) was it distributed by Democrats as a dirty trick? On these points, ABC now professes complete agnosticism.

In fact, however, ABC did not report the memo as claimed by Schneider. Both on the web and on television, it was specifically described as a "GOP talking points memo." That characterization has been picked up and repeated by countless other news organizations and columnists, and ABC's belated recantation is highly unlikely to be similarly publicized.

On behalf of the Post, Mike Allen now takes the same approach:

We simply reported that the sheet of paper was distributed to Republican senators and told our readers explicitly that the document was unsigned, making clear it was unofficial. We stuck to what we knew to be true and did not call them talking points or a Republican memo.

It is true that the Post's reporting was not as misleading as ABC's. At the same time, Allen's original article strongly implied that the memo came from the GOP. His suggestion that calling the memo "unsigned" was enough to signal ignorance about its provenance is, I think, unpersuasive. And the statement that the memo "was distributed to Republican Senators" fails to disclose that it was also distributed to Democrats and reporters, while a number of Republican Senators--I believe a majority--say they never saw it.

At the same time that he denies tarring the Republicans with the memo, Allen seems to want to keep alive the idea that it was a GOP memo after all:

"The document was provided by an official who has a long record of trustworthiness, and this official gave a precise account of the document's provenance, satisfying us that it was authentic and that it had been used in an attempt to influence Republican senators." Allen said that under the journalistic ground rules, he could not say whether the source was a Democrat or a Republican.

Oh, I'll bet I can guess. Somehow I have a sneaking suspicion that the "trustworthy official" was a Democrat. Sorry, folks: quoting an anonymous "official" telling us that the document is "authentic" doesn't cut it, any more than Dan Rather's assurance that the National Guard documents came from an "unimpeachable source."

Kurtz also quotes a "Democratic Senate official" who spoke on condition on anonymity. I love this quote; count the levels of anonymous hearsay:

"It's ridiculous to suggest that these are some talking points concocted by a Democratic staffer. The fact is, these talking points were given to a Democratic member by a Republican senator." Democratic aides, in turn, gave the memo to reporters, as the New York Times reported last week.

So: An anonymous Democratic Senator tells us that an anonymous Republican Senator gave the document to an anonymous Democratic Congressman, who passed it on to anonymous Democratic aides, who gave it to reporters. That certainly clears up any doubts about the memo! And, oh, by the way, where did the Repuublican Senator supposedly get the memo? From a Democratic staffer? A reporter? A lobbyist? Who knows?

Kurtz notes, but does not pursue, some of the reasons we have advanced suggesting that the document is a fake. No one he interviewed explained how or why the memo was revised to eliminate four typographical errors after it was first reported by ABC, but before it was leaked by Democrats on Capitol Hill to a liberal web site. And no one he interviewed explained why Republicans would either create or circulate a document suggesting that the party was seeking political gain from the Schaivo case--a claim that is a Democratic talking point, but certainly not a Republican one.

As I said to Howard Kurtz, "The content of the memo tells me it wasn't prepared to benefit the Republican Party, it was prepared to benefit the Democratic Party."

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has some excellent thoughts, too.

Here's another shrill piece about the dangers our republic faces because folks are criticizing judicial decisions and suggesting that judges have too much power. The author of the piece, Bert Brandenburg, makes no serious attempt to defend the existing balance of power between the judiciary and the other branches of government, or the way in which that power is being used. Rather, he assumes that judges should possess all of the power they have appropriated, and that criticism of the way in which they exercise their power somehow is out-of-bounds.

Brandenburg argues that, beyond criticizing judges, Congress in a few instances has passed, or is considering, legislation limiting court jurisdiction. But Congress has the constitutional right to limit federal court jurisdiction. If doing so denies citizens other constitutionally protected rights (as Brandenburg assumes, but does not argue, it will), then the courts can strike down the offending legislation, and there is no recourse except to amend the constitution.

The amendment option, too, has Brandenburg fretting. But surely Brandenburg knows how extraordinarily difficult it is to amend the constitution. By contrast, it is easy to talk about amending the constitution, and such talk is, perhaps, one way to prevent judges from abusing their power to the point that amending the constitution becomes a realistic option. Threats of impeachment, about which Brandenburg also frets despite the absence of any actual judicial impeachments, is another. Brandenburg calls this "intimidation." I call it the natural playing out of the inevitable tension that results from giving unelected judges a large say in the context of democratic governance. The alternative, reacting passively or not at all to each new society-altering judicial pronouncement, is clearly unacceptable in a democracy.

Yesterday's Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial supporting an increase in the minimum wage in Minnesota to $7.00 deserves much more attention. The Star Tribune editorial plays into a Democratic effort that seeks to use the Democratic majority in the Minnesota Senate to roll House Republicans (holding a tenuous majority) and present Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty with the unpalatable alternative of signing or vetoing the bill. I wrote about the editorial in "Faith and economics at the Star Tribune." The only thing the editorial gets right is the scent of weakness that it picks up on the Republican side.

Many readers wrote with excellent points on the subject. The Star Tribune editorial is extraordinarily misleading for such a short piece, but is otherwise par for course at the Star Tribune. Here are a couple of considerations overlooked in the editorial.

The editorial refers to fourteen other states including Oregon and Washington as having already raised their minimum wage. I took a look at Oregon. The minimum wage in Oregon is $7.25 as of January 1, 2004, and is adjusted annually for inflation by a calculation using the U.S. City Average Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers for All Items.

The current federal minimum wage is $5.15. Oregon's minimun wage was raised in stages beginning in January 1997. It was raised from $5.50 to $6.00 in 1998 and $6.50 in 1999. The raises in the minimum wage roughly coincided with a long period of stagnation in job growth. In 2004, job growth made a slight recovery after more than three years of stagnation. Before 2004, Oregon had held the highest or second highest unemployment rate in the country for 41 months. See the January 14, 2005 AP story "Oregon unemployment rate drops to 6.8 percent." It would be nice if the Star Tribune had provided some context to its encouragement of Minnesota's emulation of Oregon.

The Star Tribune editorial implies that raising the minimum wage is a good method of reducing destitution among the poorest workers. Put to one side the fact that the editorial passes over in silence the effect of the earned income tax credit, which by itself belies the point of the editorial. The Star Tribune fails to provide any information to substantiate the implication of its editorial, and in fact it appears to be erroneous.

The Employment Policies Institute has calculated the average family income of employees who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage based on Census Bureau Data (click here). According to the EPI breakdown (based on 2003 data), the average family income of Minnesota's destitute minimum wage workers is...$57,421. Funny that the Star Tribune didn't get around to entertaining this consideration in its editorial either.

There is much more to be said on the subject, but my last point this morning is political. It's time for a gut check on the part of Minnesota Republicans.

We're not the first to this party, but, hey, it's never too late to pile on Paul Krugman. Rightwing Nuthouse says that Krugman's latest column in the New York Times is evidence that he has "gone stark, raving mad." I won't go that far; let's just say that Krugman has abandoned any claim to be taken seriously.

Krugman's latest column is a hysterical tirade against conservative Republicans. But you knew that; I'll have to be more specific. Krugman is worried that conservative Christians are about to start assassinating liberals. No, really, I'm not kidding:

[N]obody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself. [Hold that thought: we'll be talking about contempt for democracy later--Ed.]

We can see this failing clearly in other countries. In the Netherlands, for example, a culture of tolerance led the nation to ignore the growing influence of Islamic extremists until they turned murderous.

But it's also true of the United States, where dangerous extremists belong to the majority religion and the majority ethnic group, and wield great political influence.

Did you think I was making up the part about assassinations? Nope:

America isn't yet [!] a place where liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren't sufficiently hard-line, fear assassination. But unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here.

That's quite an indictment: conservative Christians (that would be the "majority religion," right?) are "dangerous extremists," who, if left unchecked, are likely to start assassinating liberal and centrist politicians. What evidence does Krugman offer for his startling claim?

Krugman's first argument is his best; one of the Schindler family's spokesmen is acquainted with a guy who murdered an abortionist, and Judge Greer has bodyguards. But, sadly, it isn't unusual for judges involved in controversial cases to have bodyguards on a temporary basis; the U.S. Marshals' Service reports 39 protective details for judges and prosecutors in 2004, and that's just the federal system. And, as far as violence by political extremists is concerned, ecoterrorists have carried out at least as many violent attacks as anti-abortion fanatics. But, in Krugman's twisted world, that's different.

From there, Krugman's arguments get worse. As an example of the frightening lawlessness of the "religious right," he offers:

[T]here has been little national exposure for a Miami Herald report that Jeb Bush sent state law enforcement agents to seize Terri Schiavo from the hospice - a plan called off when local police said they would enforce the judge's order that she remain there.

Krugman calls this an instance of the willingness of conservatives "to violate the spirit of the law, if not yet [!] the letter, to cater to the religious right." But the news reports Krugman refers to emphasize the determination of Governor Bush and his state agencies to abide by the law:

Bush spokeswoman Alia Faraj denied Friday that Bush ever intended to act without judicial approval. "There was no plan," she said. "We were working through the legal process. We were hopeful that the new information would raise enough doubt to give her another opportunity."

FDLE spokesman Tom Berlinger said Friday: "At the request of the governor's office, we had a special agent supervisor and a couple of agents on standby for some time Thursday and for some time Wednesday, along with folks from DCF and a doctor.

"Had a legal window of opportunity come, where they would have been allowed to proceed to the hospice and rehydrate Ms. Schiavo, they were ready and prepared to do that. Unfortunately, that legal window never came."

Faraj said Bush "did everything he could within the law, and we were faced with defeats in the judicial process even though we felt we had compelling new information about Terri's medical condition."

It's certainly easy to see how such violent lawlessness will lead to political assassination.

Krugman's arguments keep sliding downhill, as he cites--bizarrely--yesterday's Washington Post article about pharmacists who are declining to fill prescriptions for drugs--e.g., the "morning after" pill--that are inconsistent with their religious beliefs, as support for the idea that liberals will start getting assassinated any moment now.

Finally, Krugman gets to the real point:

But the big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster, so that the courts can be packed with judges less committed to upholding the law than Mr. Greer.

Remember Krugman's claim that his opponents manifest "contempt for democracy"? Democracy means, if it means anything, majority rule. The conservatives whom Krugman accuses of "extremism" believe that the Constitution means what it says: the Senate is to "advise and consent" to Presidential appointments, not refuse to take a position. Krugman's view is that a minority of 40 Senators must be able to block any federal appointment, including the appointment of federal judges. And anyone who supports majority rule, and the Constitutional right of the President to appoint judges, is an "extremist." Not only that, an extremist whose views are tending toward systematic assassination of liberal and moderate politicians. Beyond that, of course, the whole liberal project as it relates to the judiciary is intended to frustrate democracy. The filibuster is an anti-democratic means of perpetuating an anti-democratic system of rule by judicial fiat.

One could simply rest the case here, and conclude that Paul Krugman is a nut. Or, one could point out that the last three national politicians who have actually been shot at were George Wallace, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.

Does Krugman think that these attempted political assassinations were the natural result of "extremism" on the left? Does he think that the recently reported plot to murder President Bush was the result, at least in part, of the hysterical attacks on the President by Krugman and his fellow lefitists? On these points, he is silent. If Krugman is concerned about efforts to murder conservative politicians, he is keeping it to himself.

The professional association of newspaper editorial writers is the National Conference of Editorial Writers. Its quarterly publication is The Masthead, whose editor this year is Arizona Republic editorial writer and columnist Douglas MacEachern. At the end of last year Doug invited me to submit a column reflecting on our experience covering the political scene on Power Line last year as part of a bloggers' symposium for Masthead's forthcoming (Spring) issue.

I just received the issue in the mail yesterday and it is terrific. Unfortunately, the issue is not available online. The other contributors to the symposium on bloggers are Phil Boas, deputy editor of the Arizona Republic's editorial page (I'm asking Doug's permission to get access to Boas's column for Power Line); Tom Bevan and John McIntyre of RealClearPolitics; blogger/columnist Austin Bay of Austin Bay; and Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos. (Note to Doug: I want to post the RCP guys' column and Bay's column here as well). Their contributions are uniformly thoughtful and excellent.

Intended for an audience of editorial writers and incorporating our brief New York Times election-day retrospective, here is the column I submitted to Masthead on behalf of Power Line:

I write for the Power Line blog together with two other like-minded, politically conservative attorneys. Our site features commmentary and analysis that applies a gimlet eye to the mainstream media's coverage of politics. (By "mainstream media" I mean the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the broadcast networks. Because two of the three Power Line contributors are based in Minneapolis, we also pay special attention to the parodic emulation by the Minneapolis Star Tribune of its elite exemplars.)

The lameness of the mainstream media's coverage this year kept us busy. As Newsweek's Evan Thomas famously remarked: "Let's talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win. . . . They're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there's going to be this glow about them . . . that's going to be worth maybe 15 points." We sought to serve as a counterweight that injected an element of fairness into the coverage.

We were originally struck by the mainstream media's attempt to ignore the issues raised by John O'Neill and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth regarding John Kerry's military service and antiwar activities. Only when the Kerry campaign itself chose to respond, and then only in the most selective fashion, did the mainstream media find the Swift Boat Vets worthy of coverage.

We thought otherwise, and covered their emergence with great interest. We looked into their exposure of the story of John Kerry's oft-told but bogus tale of a secret Christmas mission to Cambodia in 1968. We found the story to be remarkable. Although the Minneapolis Star Tribune promptly published our column telling the story, the deputy editor of the editorial page thanked us for our efforts by condemning us as "smear artists" engaged in "immorality" and "fraudulence" in a column the paper ran the following Sunday.

Virtually every mainstream media news story recounting the role played by Swift Boat Veterans in the past campaign refers to them as "discredited" or the like. Readers who confine their consumption of news to mainstream media news outlets are unlikely to know that some hundred pages of Kerry's military records remain unreleased to this day because Kerry refused to sign a release authorizing their disclosure. Might we be forgiven for concluding that it was the mainstream media rather than the Swift Boat Vets that were discredited in the past campaign?

At Power Line, our most most important contribution to counterbalancing the partisanship of the mainstream media was our role in the exposure of the fake documents publicized by "60 Minutes" in its September 8 report on President Bush's Air National Guard service. We participated in this exposure by focusing attention on the documents themselves in CBS's online version of the story and by quoting Buckhead's now famous observation regarding the documents' apparent inauthenticity in a post titled "The Sixty-first Minute" that I published on our site on the morning of September 9. As we were inundated with additional information from readers and fellow bloggers that morning and through the rest of the day, we culled, organized, and posted the best of it in updates to our "Sixty-first Minute" post minutes quickly after receiving it. The information addressed topics including typewriters of the early 1970's and arcane points of military protocol in the same era.

Within 12 hours of our original post, more than 500 other Web sites had linked to ours, millions of people were aware of the serious questions that had been raised about CBS's documents, and CBS News executives were on the defensive. When it became clear within a few days that the documents were indeed fake, the role played by the blogs in their exposure was widely recognized as a watershed of some kind. We hope the event signifies that in the future the mainstream media will not be able to dictate the flow of information to the American people.

Tomorrow, France and Israel play a soccer match in Tel-Aviv that will help determine the World Cup qualification prospects of both countries. The two teams are currently tied, along with Ireland, for the top spot in their qualification group. Switzerland is just behind these three. The group winner will automatically qualify; the runner-up will remain eligible. France won the World Cup in 1998 and the European Championship in 2000, but has struggled since. Israel helped eliminate France from qualification in 1994.

The Jerusalem Post reports on the conflict some French Jews feel in deciding which team to root for -- the country they live in now, or the one they may feel compelled to move to if things continue as they are going in France, as an increasing number of French Jews have done recently. One such Jew, Aliette Kaen, told the JPost, "My family left France because we were not comfortable with how we felt as Jews there; I have felt more at home here in Israel than I felt in my entire 20 years in France."

The story also includes this quotation from veteran French player Fabian Barthez, who threatened not to travel to Israel: "I see everything that is happening there and it worries me enormously." Barthez seems to be living back in the days when he was still a great goalkeeper.

UPDATE: Abas Suan, an Israeli-Arab, is a key member of Israel's national team. He scored a crucial goal against Ireland on Saturday. Calev Ben-David discusses the racist abuse directed at Suan, and other Israeli-Arab players, by extremist fans in Jerusalem.

Kofi Annan is hanging tough for now. Fox News reports that, when asked today at a news conference whether he would resign, Annan responded, "hell no."

I'd be happy to see Annan stay on. But then, I don't have the interests of the U.N. in mind.

Brendan Miniter of the Wall Street Journal explains the true stakes in the debate over social security reform. Ultimately, says Miniter, the issue isn't whether social security funds will be invested in the stock market. Rather, the issue is whether the government will direct this investment.

I think Miniter is correct. The news on the future of social security is almost entirely grim. At some point in the future, the system will have to be fixed through a combination of benefit cuts and tax increases. The one mitigating piece of good news is that, thanks to the stock market, social security funds can be invested in a way that, over time, will yield much higher returns than the present system does. Thus, whichever party fixes social security will want money to be invested in stocks. However, the high yields of the stock market can be exploited either by letting individuals invest their money in the market or by having the government invest it there for them. As Miniter argues, a huge problem with the latter approach is that it will give the government a powerful new tool with which to influence financial markets for political reasons.

My sense has been that, unless one party gains total political ascendancy, social security reform will not occur until the solvency crisis is virtually upon us. If I'm right, this means it probably won't occur for some time. I'm hoping that by the time it does occur, the electorate will be dominated by people who are comfortable investing their money in the stock market, and who will be loathe to turn control of their investment decisions over to the government. I'm not confident that we have that electorate now.

The Volcker Committee issued its Second Interim Report on its U.N. Oil-For-Food investigation today; you can read it here. I haven't read it yet--and, frankly, I probably won't--but you can read Roger Simon's comments on the report here, and Move America Forward's analysis here.

Senator Norm Coleman, who investigated the Oil For Food program as chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released a statement that said in part:

The report of Paul Volcker’s Independent Inquiry Committee has revealed what I concluded many months ago through the initial investigation of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations -- Kofi Annan is responsible for the failed management that resulted in the fraud and abuse of the Oil-for-Food Program.  His lack of leadership, combined with conflicts of interest and a lack of responsibility and accountability point to one, and only one, outcome: His resignation. 

The Volcker Report will show that Kojo Annan lied.  He lied to investigators.  He lied to the public.  And, worse, he lied to his father.  While Kofi Annan may not be responsible for the acts of his son, he is responsible for failing to reveal a serious conflict of interest. Specifically, he permitted the U.N. to give massive contracts to the company that employed his son.  This egregious conflict of interest is simply inexcusable and further damages the credibility of the organization he leads.

In addition, the revelation that the U.N. has agreed to pay the legal fees of Benon Sevan is beyond comprehension.  That the U.N. would pay for his defense, and finance it through the very institution he abused, is immoral and unethical.  In my opinion, there is probable cause to criminally charge Mr. Sevan for his actions.  The fact that the U.N. is reimbursing Mr. Sevan with money that rightfully belongs to the Iraqi people is outrageous.

I firmly believe in the role of a strong and vibrant United Nations in the world.  I have been hopeful that Mr. Annan would put the interests of the U.N. ahead of his personal interest. To date, he has failed to do so. My hope is that the latest findings from Paul Volker will hasten Mr. Annan’s departure.

The deadline for Dartmouth alumni voting in the Dartmouth trustee election is April 22, not the earlier date to which I referred in a post last night. (Thanks to reader Joseph Asch for pointing out my error.)

According to the Associated Press, the mystery of Iraq's missing anthrax may have been solved. Both the U.N. and various nations' inelligence agencies had been puzzled by what happened to approximately 1,800 gallons of anthrax that Saddam's regime produced, but never accounted for. Prior to the Iraq war, it was widely believed that the regime retained some or all of this material. The AP reports:

[T]he mystery of the missing anthrax appears to have been resolved in a little-noted section of the Iraq Survey Group report, a 350,000-word document issued Oct. 6.

The British-educated [Rihab Rashid] Taha, who ran the Hakam complex in the 1980s, told interrogators her staff carted off anthrax from Hakam in April 1991 and stored it in a bungalow near the presidential palace at Radwaniyah, 20 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. teams report.
    
Later that year, the crew dumped the chemically deactivated anthrax on grounds surrounded by a Special Republican Guard barracks near the palace, the report says.
    
Australian microbiologist Rod Barton, who took part in Iraq Survey Group interrogations, said in a recent Australian Broadcasting Corp. interview that the disposal was carried out in July 1991, when Iraqi orders were issued to destroy all bioweapons agents immediately. Then, through the years, Mrs. Taha and other Iraqi officials denied the "missing" anthrax ever existed.
    
"The members of the program were too fearful to tell the regime that they had dumped deactivated anthrax within sight of one of the principal presidential palaces," the Iraq Survey Group says.

I haven't had time to go back and check the ISG report, and from the AP account it isn't clear whether Saddam didn't know that the anthrax had been destroyed, or just didn't know that it had been dumped near one of his palaces. But it sounds like the former.

Or is it the other way around? The Washington Times reports:

The condemnation of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda by the Islamic Commission of Spain on the first anniversary of the train bombings in Madrid that took 200 lives is making waves throughout the Muslim world.

The Spanish commission's fatwa, or condemnation, follows other signs of the kind of public theological debate rarely seen in the Muslim world, openly challenging the dominance of Saudi Arabia's wealthy Wahhabi fanatics.

On the other hand, the Washington Post describes an ugly incident in Basra, in which fundamentalist Shiite "militia" attacked a group of college students who were having a picnic:

A group of Shiite Muslim militiamen with rifles, pistols, thick wire cables and sticks charged into crowds of hundreds at a college picnic. They fired shots, beat students and hauled some of them away in pickup trucks. The transgressions: men dancing and singing, music playing and couples mixing.

"They focused on the women," said Saeed's ... Osama Adnan. "They were beating them viciously."

"Without any discrimination," Saeed added.

Within half an hour, the fracas had ended. University officials said 15 students were seriously injured.

Whether Islam can be reformed is the great question of the age. It is a question to which no one knows the answer.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial on the proposal to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.00 is, as might be expected, pitiful: "Minimum wage/Time for an increase." It is also, however, a perfect example of what passes for argument and analysis among the Star Tribune's lefties-only editorial board.

The proposal emanates from the Democrat-controlled Minnesota Senate. The source of the proposal is a kind of warrant of its good faith in the eyes of the Star Tribune. More importantly, however, the proposal reflects "an article of faith." The relevant article of faith here is one found in the High Church of Liberalism: "that someone who works full time should achieve a certain degree of economic dignity."

On the one hand, this is a frustratingly vague article of faith: What the heck is economic dignity? What degree of economic dignity should someone who works full time have? On the other hand, we may infer that it is an article of faith with an amazingly high degree of precision: "I believe in jobs that pay $5.15 an hour in 1997 dollars, or $7.00 an hour in 2006 dollars." Is there anyone out there in Strib land who wonders whether $7.00 an hour doesn't buy enough economic dignity to warrant credal status? Why so cheap an article of faith? Why not $14.00 an hour? Or $140.00 an hour? Perhaps this is where that "article of faith" point comes in handy. Credo quia absurdum.

But this is the kind of article of faith that has evidence to support it! Raising the minimum wage by law has no adverse economic consequences. Economists, who might be thought to know something about the subject, thought so once upon a time. (Actually, they still do.) Now, however, it is only fuddy-duddy "business lobbyists" who hold such troglodytic views:

There are principled arguments against a higher minimum wage, but they no longer hold up under scrutiny. Business lobbyists say that a higher wage will stifle job creation. The idea is plausible in principle, but a landmark study by Princeton economists David Card and Alan Krueger found the effects to be negligible in practice. In fact, of the 13 states that exceeded the federal minimum wage in 2003, seven outperformed the rest of the country in job creation.

What was that Card/Krueger study? Why bother with details when you're dealing with an article of faith, and of course the Star Tribune doesn't bother. The famous Card/Krueger study involved calling fast food outlets in New Jersey after New Jersey raised its minimum wage in 1992. The study found that raising the minimum wage had no impact on jobs at the fast food outlets.

Here is a good summary of the Card/Krueger study and its flaws by Benjamin Zycher:

The most frequently cited, and seemingly most convincing, new study takes advantage of a "natural experiment" created when New Jersey raised its minimum wage from $4.25 an hour to $5.05 in April 1992. David Card and Alan Krueger of Princeton reasoned that since economic conditions ought not vary greatly between southern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, which are essentially a single economy, looking at employment trends in the two states ought to reveal the effects of the minimum wage.

Card and Krueger conducted telephone surveys of about 400 fast-food restaurants in February-March 1992, and then again in November-December 1992. They asked questions about full- and part-time workers, wages, benefits, and prices. From their statistical analysis of those survey data, Card and Krueger not only "find no evidence that the rise in New Jersey's minimum wage reduced employment at fast-food restaurants in the state," but "find that the increase in the minimum wage increased employment." Indeed, the Card/Krueger statistical analysis suggests that the 18.8-percent increase in the New Jersey minimum wage yielded a 20.8-percent increase in employment relative to the Pennsylvania sample.

One immediate problem is that the authors looked only at major fast-food chains: Elementary economic analysis does not say that if you increase the minimum wage, employment will go down in every business--or in any particular business. The higher minimum wage might have differing impacts across firms. Indeed, it is possible that the major fast-food chains might emerge better off if the increased minimum wage raises costs at such smaller competitors as mom-and-pop fast-food stands.

Moreover, the Card/Krueger study turns out to have a major flaw: The survey data upon which it depends are lousy.

Suspicious of the Card/Krueger data and findings, the Employment Policies Institute gathered the actual payroll records from the Burger King franchises in the Card/Krueger zip codes and compared them to franchises surveyed in those zip codes. The survey data were wildly inconsistent with the payroll records. (The payroll sample also includes some restaurants that Card and Krueger missed.)

Independently, David Neumark of Michigan State and William Wascher of the Federal Reserve noticed that the variation in employment changes across the surveyed restaurants in the Card/Krueger sample seemed implausibly large--some restaurants had supposedly added huge numbers of employees while others had supposedly cut large numbers. In relatively small businesses, this sort of fluctuation seemed odd.

So Neumark and Wascher reviewed the payroll employment data gathered by EPI. When they applied the payroll data to the same econometric model used by Card and Krueger, they got completely different results. The variation in employment changes declined markedly, and analysis of the new data yields an estimated 4.8-percent decline in New Jersey employment relative to the Pennsylvania sample as a result of the higher minimum wage. Where payroll data could be compared with survey data for specific restaurants, Neumark and Wascher also found numerous errors in the Card/ Krueger data.

Looking just at Burger King restaurants, for instance, the Card/Krueger survey data show employment declines in two of three Pennsylvania zip codes, while the payroll data show employment increases in all three zip codes. Neumark and Wascher conclude that the questions used by Card and Krueger were too vague to generate precise information. For example, the survey asked how many "full-time" and "part-time" employees a restaurant had. But it didn't define either those terms (40 hours a week? 30?) or the relevant time period (within the last week? month? year?), leaving different restaurant managers to define the question differently. In short, using the actual payroll data instead of the survey "guesstimates" effectively refutes the Card/Krueger findings yielded by the New Jersey/Pennsylvania "natural experiment."

Or perhaps the Star Tribune is referring to other Card/Krueger studies, or to the book that Card and Krueger subsequently published on the subject, Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage. The Star Tribune's reference to "a landmark study" makes it difficult to determine what is being cited. In any event, see Deer, Murphy and Welch, "Sense and Nonsense on the Minimum Wage." The Star Tribune editorial today falls into the category of "nonsense on the minimum wage."

Reader Louis Rossetto pointed out this extraordinarily well written piece on the Schiavo case by Harvard student Joe Ford, who suffers from cerebral palsy. Mr. Ford still seems a bit annoyed with the doctor who once tried to put him out of his misery. It is a superb article; don't miss it.

In his great poem "Easter 1916," William Butler Yeats reflects with ambivalent admiration on the Irish uprising against the British. Yeats moves from noting how the uprising has altered his perception of his fellow countrymen, to paying tribute to the sacrifice of those fallen at arms, to wondering whether their valor may have required too much hardness of heart, to asking whether their sacrifice might prove needless. Yeats nevertheless finds the uprising a transformative moment. The poem concludes with a tribute to the executed leaders of the rebellion:

I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

At Dartmouth College, where green is also worn, the college administration has produced a transformative moment of its own. Two outsider candidates -- Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki -- have had the temerity to submit themselves for election to the college board of trustees. I have written about their campaign several times here and in "Bucking the deans at Dartmouth" for the Daily Standard.

Knowing the odds against them and the restrictive rules that governed the election, Robinson and Zywicki geared their preelection activities to the scheduled commencement of the election on March 7 (voting is to be closed on April 11). The rules against electioneering have been honored by the college more in the breach than in the observance. Moreover, mysterious maladies have hit their campaigns. One of Zywicki's two permitted email messges to alumni was lost in transmission. The hard copy ballots that were to be sent to alumni in early March did not make it into the mail until some time last week.

I called the college today to ask where my ballot was and whether the voting deadline would be extended. The powers-that-be at the college extended the voting deadline this morning from April 11 to April 22 -- or so I was advised in a telephone conversation with a college representative this morning. Tonight she writes to tell me that she "inquired about extending the voting deadline with my supervisor, and he informed me that it is up to the Balloting Committee of the Alumni Association, not Alumni Relations. He has passed along the suggestion to them, and as soon as we hear a response, I will let you know."

Referring to my quotation of a college representative in the Daily Standard column, Frank Gato writes today;

Patricia Fisher's claim that "the restrictive election rules enforce 'a level playing field'" has certainly not been true in practice, whatever their intent. From the moment Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki filed their petitions, the rules have been applied selectively and with patent unfairness.

A group of alumni intertwined with the administration-friendly Alumni Council began electioneering attacks on the two petition candidates, and College personnel have added their own disparaging public statements. In addition, the paper ballots, which were to have been mailed on March 7, still have not arrived in alumni mailboxes.

Robinson and Zywicki timed their statements to accord with the announced start of the election, but while alumni have been awaiting the delayed ballots, they have been receiving statements from [Dartmouth] President Wright that undercut the campaign positions of the petition candidates. Also during this interval, the Council candidates' statements are being released seriatim and increasingly sound like echoes of the Robinson and Zywicki campaigns.

If this is Fisher's notion of a level field, she should at least acknowledge that one team has the more favorable playing surface.

Dartmouth is a college that has long prided itself on the extraordinary attachment felt by its alumni to the school. At Dartmouth, all is changed, but it is something far from a terrible beauty that is born. Working "Easter 1916" in reverse, the college has showed itself to be, in Yeats's damning phrase, "where motley is worn."

CORRECTION: The original deadline for voting in the trustee election is April 22. Whether it will be extended is apparently subject to consideration as set forth in the email message quoted above that I received from the college.

When I was I kid, I liked Alfred Hitchcock's short story collections. My favorite horror story was called "The Kill;" I forget who wrote it, but it was about a young man who had inherited a property in central Europe and was en route, on a train, to claim it. The train stops at a station late at night, and is delayed for some hours. There is one other person in the station, so the young man sits by the stove and relates the strange story of his inheritance. It seems that a werewolf has been killing the heirs to the property. Along the way, the traditional belief that you can identify a werewolf because his ring finger is longer than his middle finger is noted. In the end, the young man finishes his story; his companion slowly removes his gloves, and, sure enough...

So imagine my amazement when I saw this headline today: "Fingers Point to Male Aggression":

A University of Alberta study finds that measuring a man's index finger length relative to his ring finger length predicts his predisposition to being physically aggressive.

The shorter the index finger relative to the ring finger, the higher the amount of prenatal testosterone and the more likely the man will be physically aggressive, they researchers say.

According to the researchers, experts have known for a hundred years that the index-to-ring finger length ratio of men differs considerably from that seen in women. And more recently, research has suggested that the length of men's fingers changes depending on their exposure to testosterone in the womb.

Once again, it seems that those old wives knew a thing or two. And if you find yourself all alone in a railway station with a guy who has a really, really long ring finger, ru